Abstract

In exploring the principles of a "poetics of the collection," this article focuses on one of three possible avenues of investigation : namely, on the postulate that in a collection a particular literary or poetic quality may come to accrue to texts which they did not originally possess. The outline of a typology of collections is followed by an analysis of the collected essays of Paul Valéry (Variété, 1924) and Robert Musil (Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten, 1936). Study of the paratext in relation to the structure of the works suggests that their poeticity stems from the nature of the collection itself. More than the mere working out of a meaningful progression, the collection carries marks of the very processes of edition. Thus, collections of essays are polytextual works whose internal arrangement is not merely an incident of construction, but also a strategic gesture for integrating the works into the literary field.